Charles Stross - Rule 34

You pull your hand back. “No it isn’t.”

“Believe me,” he says slowly.

You cross your arms, mulish. “Tell me. Or it’s all going down the shitter tonight.”

He begins to smile. “I wouldn’t do that. Dough tends to clog the pipes. Just think of the plumber’s face…”

Despite yourself, you begin to relax. “What is it, really?”

The Gnome fidgets with his drink for a few seconds, then takes a mouthful and wipes his lips dry with the back of a grubby sleeve whose self-cleaning fabric he’s long since overloaded. “It’s bread mix. What you mean is, what else is it.”

“What? What else can it be?”

“Keep thinking that thought.” He smiles disquietingly. “Probably nothing, without Secret Ingredient X.” He whistles between his teeth. “‘Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department,’ says Wernher von Braun.”

“Secret Ingredient X?”

“You read about so much stuff in the science blogs these days.” The Gnome holds up his pint. “Zymurgy: the oldest human science.”

“Zy—”

“Fermentation. Brewing. Saccharomyces cerevisiae , brewer’s yeast. It was one of the first organisms to have its genome sequenced, you know that? It’s used in baking as well; it’s what makes the bread rise.” He picks up the packet. “This bread mix is interesting. You could brew with it. The beer would probably taste like shit—it doesn’t have any hops—but it’ll still be beer.” And with that, he slides it into one capacious coat pocket.

You take another deep gulp from your pint glass. “So?”

“So think of S. cerevisiae as a handy little biological factory.” The Gnome peers at the bag of bread mix. “Normally it’ll produce bread. But suppose you want to send some interesting chemical feedstock to someone. All they need to know is that they chuck the bread mix in a sterile demijohn with five or ten litres of warm water. And then… It produces crap beer. Only before they put it in the demijohn, they add Secret Ingredient X, which is probably some dietary supplement you can buy over the counter in any health-food shop. And in the presence of Secret Ingredient X, some extra metabolic pathway gets switched on, because this is not your ordinary S. cerevisiae ; this is mutant ninja genetically engineered superyeast.”

“But what does it make ?”

The Gnome finishes his pint and meets you with a bright-eyed smile. “I really have no idea. And you know what? I don’t particularly want to know. You don’t want to know. Colonel Datka doesn’t want you to know; otherwise, he’d have told you. It’s a lot simpler if all anybody knows is that you’ve been told to hand out free samples of organic bread mix by your employer’s trade delegation. Oh, and we didn’t have this conversation, and we weren’t in the back of a pub where there’s sod-all phone signal and no free net access and no CCTV because it’s quarried out of the side of a granite cliff-face. Are we singing from the same hymn book?”

After a moment, you nod. “Is this what you were asking me to keep an eye out for?”

“Could be.” The Gnome reaches into one pocket and pulls out a fat lump of dead cow-skin, as battered and shapeless as if it has been whacked with a hammer. He opens it and pulls out a stack of bank-notes. “This is for you. Don’t spend them all in the same place.”

You reach out and snatch the money. There’s the thick end of a thousand euros there, maybe more. Before the savage deflation of the past few years, you might have thought he was cheaping on you. But not now. It’s enough to pay the mortgage arrears for three months. “I don’t know if I should be doing this.”

The Gnome’s grin slips. “Neither do I, laddie, neither do I.” He puts the wallet away, then pats you on the knee. “But just consider the alternatives.”

Ants. I am surrounded by fucking ants. Can’t they get anything right?

This is not rocket science. (Rocket science: fucking 1930s shit invented by Nazi übermensch engineers and so easy that by the 1990s even a bunch of camel-fucking towel-heads could master it.)

This is not AI. (Artificial intelligence: fucking 1950s shit invented by Jew-boy intellectuals at Stanford and MIT and so useless that by the 1990s its highest achievement was beating a vodka-swilling Russian commie dog-fucker at chess.)

This is not genetic engineering. (Genetic engineering: fucking 1970s shit invented by… you get the picture.)

This is logistics !

It goes back to the fucking Stone Age!

They can put a genetically engineered AI on Mars, but they can’t shift a fucking suitcase between two hotels without losing it.

I am surrounded by ants, and if this continues I am going to pull on my size-fourteen boots and go for a stomp. See if I don’t.

This isn’t a complex job. Truly, it isn’t. I move hotels every day or two—in fact, I’ve been doing it every day or two for several years now. It’s not as if my job’s compatible with having a mortgage or living in a fucking suburban shoe-box with an avocado bathroom suite and a bored housewife and nosy neighbours peering over the picket fence, is it? Santa’s got a lot of travelling to do if all good children are going to get their toys, and the jet lag’s a mother-fucker. (And so’s my carbon footprint, but that’s not my problem: The whiners’ll figure out a way to fix global warming. Meanwhile, I fly business class.)

As I was saying, I travel a lot, and I travel light. 5.62 kilograms, to be precise. That’s the maximum payload weight I allow myself to pack in my trolley case—that, and the clothes on my back and the contents of my brief-case. If it goes over 5.62 kilos, I have to throw something out. You can get a lot into 5.62 kilos: shaver, suit, change of shirt and underwear, commercial samples, computers. Hotels have same-day cleaning stores that sell toiletries and I’m on expenses and if something starts getting shabby I buy a replacement and it goes in the trash, capisce ?

My needs are simple: I need a hotel room and my luggage and a desk to sit at with the pad at the end of the day (and no, I’m not stupid—I don’t keep anything important on my pad, it’s all waiting in the cloud—I am in a very virtual line of work, almost ethereal).

Anyway, this is what I am paying you for.

It inconveniences me mightily if I get to my new hotel room after a hard day’s work and my rolling flight case with 5.62 kilograms of home is not there waiting for me.

I need a change of underwear, and I need a shave, and I need my luggage. Only somebody has lost my shit .

I hold you responsible.

I see you nodding like a parcel-shelf dog. No, don’t look at me like that. This is about logistics, the necessary life-support infrastructure for the modern commercial traveller. If you can’t get your logistics right, you don’t deserve to be in the hotel business, and I will personally make it my business to see that your corporate customer-satisfaction officer learns that there is a day manager on the front desk at this hotel who is fucking off the customers . And it won’t stop there. You will start to piss away corporate hospitality accounts like a junkie bleeding out into the urinal through his dick. Your staff will cross the road to avoid you, and you will see vultures circling overhead because your days in the hospitality trade will be numbered. You will lose your job and the government will foreclose on your mortgage and you will be cast out on the street to starve like an abandoned dog or be eaten alive by feral mutant children who will skull-fuck your rotting corpse through the eye-sockets with their huge gangrenous organs. This is all because you neglected to pay sufficient attention to your one most important customer today, namely me . No, don’t you fucking look at me like that, you cunt! If it’s not me, then it could be anybody else who walks up to your desk today, this month, this year .